12 Moons Solo Saxophone Project Day 267

Date: 09/24/2013

Instrument: Tenor saxophone

Location: The main performance hall at Chief Sealth High/Denny Middle School.

Notes:

This morning my chest and lungs were feeling a bit tight, maybe from a cold on the horizon. I decided to explore sound action executed within a single breath to celebrate the feeling instead of fight it. Each gesture in this piece lasted as long as my body could comfortably allow. I used a single fingering throughout, one which required a great amount of air and had a high degree of back-pressure while playing. This fingering had a wide sound-spectrum, with colors in tight and wider pitch clusters, gritty multiphonics and brittle altissimo tones. I made it my aim to simply blow into the horn with a variety of embouchure pressures and directions in air flow. From the point at which the sound came out of the horn, I would try to carefully work with what was presented to me and to shape it in subtle ways.

The fingering used was as follows/:

(Left Hand) 1-2, Octave, Palm Eb, Low Bb // (Right Hand) 1, Low C

-Neil

The image “City Night” accompanying today’s post by Norman Lewis (1949).